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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoBarbara J. Perenic | DispatchIvory Isaac, 10, gets a hug from Upper Arlington softball team captain Annika Wachtman while holding the No. 37 jersey she received last night. Ivory, who has had a brain tumor since she was 5, plans to be at every game and most practices next spring.

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As doctors ushered her through the familiar halls of the urgent-care clinic, Ivory Isaac wasn’t
thinking about the infection in her left lung that had brought the rattling cough and the soaring
fever.

Even at 10 years old, Ivory has had too many days like that to scare her.

Too many since doctors found a tumor in her brain five years ago and her mother counted the 27
tubes connected to Ivory’s body that kept her daughter alive.

So as doctors debated whether to hospitalize Ivory with pneumonia last week, her thoughts
drifted elsewhere: back to the softball diamond, and ahead to her next visit with the team.

She had met girls from the Upper Arlington High School softball team a few weeks earlier. They
taught her to swing the bat and run bases. They gave her a game ball as a souvenir that she sleeps
with at night.

The coach of the Upper Arlington team had first called Ivory’s mother, Julie, after the Isaacs
signed up for Friends of Jaclyn, a national program that pairs children who have brain tumors with
high-school and college sports teams. Children become honorary teammates, joining athletes at
practices and games.

At the urgent-care clinic, Ivory told doctors she needed a quick recovery. This week she was
going to become a Golden Bear. Her body cooperated, and yesterday she smiled as teammates welcomed
her at the school cafeteria.

“We are extremely excited,” Coach Todd DelBaccio said as team captains gave Ivory a black, No.
37 uniform in the cafeteria. “To my knowledge, this is the first athlete in Upper Arlington
softball to ever make the team before tryouts.”

She plans to join the team in the dugout at every game next spring, and at most practices. She
wants to run some drills and learn skills so she can play on her own school team when she’s in
middle school, even if she needs an oxygen tank to catch her breath.

Ivory has grown faster than her fifth-grade classmates at Parkmoor Elementary because of the
tumor and treatments. Her bone scans look like a 14-year-old’s, doctors say.

So the Upper Arlington team gives her camaraderie that has been hard to find at school.

“She seemed to have a lot more confidence around them,” Mrs. Isaac said. “Ivory doesn’t normally
take to people like this.”

At the ceremony last night, teammates jostled for time with Ivory. They pulled her into
conversations and took cellphone pictures with her. She laughed.

Her mother and father, Mike, said the team gives Ivory a chance to step from their shelter.
Other than trips to a Cincinnati hospital, she has never been far from their North Linden home. Now
Ivory hopes to join the team on overnight trips to tournaments.

After 58 operations, her cancer is in remission. Ivory becomes sick easily, but the most-severe
symptoms have subsided.

“There is a high reoccurrence rate with this kind of tumor,” Mrs. Isaac said. “We just
personally have faith that it’s not going to come back. For us, faith is what gets us through.”